Can wireless printer eat bandwidth

I'm visiting a clinic, which has a wifi that is connected to a pretty broad line runing a verified 18Mbs. There are only a few people here, so maybe 10 or so phones, four or five pcs. The internet speed is atrocious. Testin with speedtest.net I see typically well under 1 Mbs down, 40 or 50 k up. The report shows ping time inthe hundreds of ms. My home crappy little DSL at 6Mbs pings in 15 or so and never tets under about 3 Mbs even while streaming movies. The wifi here is running on a 2wire that looks fairly new, through u-verse. The nurses' station has a wireless printer, and there looks to be a couple of wireless surveillance cams. Are either or both of those enough to account for the throughput misery, and if so, what might be done about it?

 

It would use up internal bandwidth, but only when printing, and same goes for the cameras, they would only use bandwidth when they are being viewed, probably not the cause of low internet speed. Simple way to test this would be turn the printer off and run a speed test.

 

Are you connecting to a "guest" or public use account?

Many guest or free Wi-Fi access accounts (Starbucks, etc.) are set to 802.11b (not "g" or "n") speeds. This is to allow users to do basic e-mail and web surfing while discouraging bandwidth hogs from watching HD movies or doing Pirate Bay type downloads.

 

Majority of "Guest" wifi services use QOS to throttle down users from abusing the privilege of checking email, checking or posting on Facebook, reading mobile news, and that is about it.

As for Wifi A/P's being set at Wireless B, that may have been way back in the day, now they are all Wireless-N for the majority like ATT or Xfinity-wifi (Brighthouse, TWC, Comcast, etc), and some are also Wireless-G.

Only time I have come across Wireless-B A/P's, is if they are using it to extend the range of the signal across a property, or only needing it for stuff that does not need anymore than 10mbps to upload or download info.